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Tonight’s Guardian poll reminded me of something I wrote a couple of years ago, about ‘the half-life of political distaste’. From an introduction to a conversation with @justinpickard:
In my lifetime, British politics has seen two extended periods of one-party rule, the Conservatives from 1979-97 and Labour from 1997-2010. These long tenures reflect what we might call the half-life of political distaste. For both parties, the opposition years represented a long wait for the distaste building at the current government to outweigh the lingering memory of its predecessor.
In the long crisis which broke in 2008, the effects of which are still playing out, events may be running faster than is allowed for by the natural decay of political distaste. If Labour under Gordon Brown was slowing down the social impact of crisis, while Osborne, Cameron and Clegg’s attempts to cut the deficit at all costs are accelerating it, Britain’s first “collapsonomics” election may well be not that far off. In the absence of electoral reform… it is hard to see where the equivalent pressure valve of democratic discontent will come from, to match the role of new political forces in the elections Justin describes. Can we return to the relatively rapid cycling between Conservative and Labour governments which marked the crisis years of the 1970s? Could new political forces somehow emerge through the existing electoral system – or even within the existing monolithic party structures? What role is there for outsiders in British politics?
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Respondents were asked whether, despite the recession, they were “basically confident that our children’s generation will end up enjoying a better standard of living than our generation, just as our generation has mostly been better off than our parents”, the reassuring rider reminding them that – whatever the ups and downs of the cycle – the slow miracle of economic growth has eventually touched most family’s lives, by roughly doubling the size of the world’s big economies every 30 years. But even after this prompt, 19% of Britons, 15% of Americans, 16% of Germans and 17% of the French agree with this statement. Instead, overwhelming respective majorities of 64%, 65%, 66% and 59% incline to the view that “the younger generation will find it harder than ours to enjoy a reasonable standard of living”.
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A Facebook page has been set up to help promote “suspended coffee,” a way to pay-it-forward by purchasing a coffee for a stranger… The idea of suspended coffee is to purchase a coffee for someone who may seek a coffee later in the day, yet is unable to afford one… According to Snopes, suspended coffees are an “old Italian tradition” and the concept has since spread to other areas. There are over 150 cafes throughout Bulgaria that have joined the movement and many are looking for ways to initiate it in other areas as well.
Heard about this from a friend who is working with a theatre that wants to introduce ‘suspended tickets’ on the same principle. Interesting little piece of money-hacking.
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(via m1k3y)
Posted on April 11, 2013 via The Printed Internet with 7,751 notes
Source: printedinternet
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What I discovered in Tepito was a vivid illustration of how people could participate in the capitalist market economy yet subordinate that participation to their own needs. How instead of being caught up in the logic of the market, of profit making, of ever more work, of a consumerist approach to life, they could limit their work of production and selling to whatever was required to permit their real life activities: personal interaction, collective self-organization, intense struggle against the Mexican state for the preservation of their autonomy and the continuous elaboration of their own ways of being and interrelating to each others and the to the rest of Mexico.
‘The Uses of an Earthquake’, Harry Cleaver -
The attitude that people had towards the weak, hungry, sick, homeless, landless, mad, imprisoned, enslaved, fugitive, orphaned, exiled, crippled, beggars, ascetics, streetvendors, soldiers, foundlings and others who were relatively deprived has changed throughout history. For every epoch, specific attitudes to each of these categories are in a unique constellation. Economic history, when it studies poverty, tends to neglect these attitudes. Economic history tends to focus on measurements of average and median calory intake, group-specific mortality rates, the polarisation in the use of resources, etc….
From Notes and Bibliographies to Shadow Work, Ivan Illich (1981) -
In terms of the cosmic economy of sharing, then, the “peculiar” economic behaviour of hunter-gatherers with immediate-return systems makes sense. Moreover, reconceptualized in this way, Sahlins’s cultural propositions hold. But the reader is likely to ask: under what ecological conditions can people maintain, and live by, such an economic model? Furthermore, do they in fact have abundant resources, or do they merely think that they do? These are our questions, framed within our models; the people in question would not ask them. Nevertheless, most of our colleagues in the world of learning and in policy-making circles—let alone most students of hunter-gathering peoples—think in Western terms. We therefore have to address these questions…
‘Beyond “The Original Affluent Society”: A Culturalist Reformulation’, Nurit Bird-David
I always thought the way that Sahlins rested his argument on the “work-time” of hunter-gatherers was problematic, but this paper is an interesting treatment of the issues with his original essay and the reasons for believing that he, nonetheless, “had a point”. (Though I’m not so sure about the “Nature as a bank” metaphor around which the final section is built.)
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RESISTANCE CHECKLIST:
Resist whatever seems inevitable.
Resist people who seem invincible.
Resist the embrace of those who have lost.
Resist the flattery of those who have won.
Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.
Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.
Resist getting big jobs.
Resist taking the path of least resistance.
Resist the influence of the appealing.
Resist the growing conviction that They are right.
Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.
Resist believing that there is an answer to every question.
Resist accepting honors from those you do not respect.
Resist the panicky feeling that you are alone.
Resist hoping that next year will be better.
Resist assuming that the locus of power is elsewhere.
Resist believing that anyone knows what will actually happen.
Resist the indifference of adversaries.
Resist the ready acceptance of friends.
Resist the thought that life is simple, after all.
Resist the belated feeling that you should seek forgiveness.
Resist the desire to move to a different city.
Resist the notion that you should never compromise.
Resist any thought that contains the word should.
Resist people who tell you to resist.
Lebbeus Woods, ARCHITECTURE AND RESISTANCE (via bravenewwhatever) -
It’s hell writing and it’s hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
― Robert Hass (via farmerversusfox)
Amen, brother!
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Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.
‘Rich Boy’, F Scott Fitzgerald
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